Harpers Bazaar art direction
Twenty four years of spreads that treated the page turn as the unit. The origin of modern art direction.
Held by MoMA
Cited, not held
The library owns what the museums have released, which is almost entirely work published before 1930. Most of what a design course teaches came after. These 113 records carry the citation, the holder, and a way in, and leave the copy where it belongs.
The magazines that fought about legibility
15Where it was conducted, issue by issue, in public. Held by their publishers, not by us.
Seventeen, Charm and Mademoiselle art direction
First woman admitted to the Art Directors Club. She commissioned fine artists to illustrate magazines aimed at teenage girls, which was an argument about who deserves serious work.
Held by Cooper Hewitt and the Pineles estate
Esquire and Show art direction
Covers built on one idea, executed photographically.
Held by Cooper Hewitt
Twen
A twelve column grid used with almost violent scale contrast. Still the most copied magazine nobody has read.
Held by Die Neue Sammlung
Harpers Bazaar art direction
Co-directed Bazaar at 26. Pairs with Brodovitch to show what changed and what did not.
Held by Cooper Hewitt
The Black Panther newspaper
A weekly paper as an organizing tool. The clearest case in the course of design doing political work with no budget.
Held by MoMA and the Oakland Museum
Time magazine explanatory graphics
The opposite pole from Tufte: illustration used to make a number stick. Teach them together and let the class fight.
Held by Nigel Holmes and Print archive
The Face
Brody built a new masthead almost every issue, which made the magazine identity an ongoing act rather than a fixed mark.
Held by the V&A, which collects his work
Emigre (issues 1 to 69)
The magazine where the typography carried the editorial position instead of serving it. Licko drew the faces, VanderLans set the pages, and the two jobs stopped being separate. Back issues are sold by Emigre directly.
Held by Emigre Inc.
Does It Make Sense?
An entire issue as one digital image, made when that was barely possible.
Held by Design Quarterly and Walker Art Center
Black Designers: Missing in Action
The essay that named the absence. Assign it alongside the canon, not after it.
Held by Print Magazine archive
Eye
Where design criticism actually happens. Useful for teaching students to write about work, not just make it.
Held by Eye Magazine
Colors
A Benetton-funded magazine that spent the budget on race, AIDS, and war. Good for the ethics unit: who paid, and what did they get.
Held by Benetton Group, which published it
FUSE
Typefaces published as experiments, four to an issue with a poster each. Nobody was expected to set text in them.
Held by Taschen (collected edition)
Ray Gun (1992 to 2000)
The test case for whether legibility is the same thing as communication. Carson set an interview in a symbol font. Useful in class precisely because students disagree about it.
Held by Ray Gun Publishing and private collections
Identity as a system
17Marks, programs and the manuals that made them repeatable. The deliverable is the system, not the logo.
CBS on-air graphics and the Emancipation stamp
One of the first Black designers to lead a network design group. The 1963 stamp is his.
Held by Smithsonian
IBM logo and design program
The case that a mark is the smallest part of an identity. The program, not the logo, is the deliverable.
Held by IBM
Chermayeff and Geismar identity work
Decades of marks from one office, which lets students compare a house method against changing fashion.
Held by Chermayeff and Geismar and Haviv
Brazilian corporate identity programs
Ulm method applied in Sao Paulo. Good for asking what travels and what does not.
Held by Museu da Casa Brasileira and Lars Muller
Westinghouse identity
Shows Rand solving the same problem twice in different registers, which makes the reasoning visible.
Held by IBM and AIGA Design Archives
Sea Ranch supergraphics
Swiss training turned loose on architecture at full wall scale.
Held by SFMOMA
American Airlines identity
Survived almost fifty years untouched, which is what restraint buys.
Held by Vignelli Center for Design Studies
Mexico 1968 Olympic identity
Op art, Huichol pattern and the Games logotype fused into one system that ran the whole city.
Held by Cooper Hewitt
AT&T, Bell System and United Airlines marks
The same designer working at the opposite end of the scale from titles.
Held by AIGA Design Archives
New York City Subway diagram
The clearest fight in the course: a diagram that is right about the network and wrong about the city. It was replaced in 1979.
Held by MoMA
Munich 1972 Olympic design program
Pictograms built on one grid, so an entire wayfinding language stays consistent. The origin of most airport symbols in use now.
Held by Die Neue Sammlung, The Design Museum Munich
I Love NY
A mark that escaped its owner. Good for the unit on ownership and trademark.
Held by New York State and MoMA
Los Angeles 1984 Olympics environmental graphics
A city dressed on a budget with colour and scaffolding. The counter-argument to Munich rigor.
Held by Getty Research Institute
Pentagram identity work
A partner model where the designer stays the author. Relevant to the business half of the course.
Held by Pentagram
The Public Theater identity
Typography doing the work of illustration. A system loose enough to keep generating new work.
Held by Pentagram
Census 2000 communication design
Public information design at national scale, judged by whether people actually responded.
Held by AIGA and the Sylvia Harris estate
Muji art direction
Emptiness argued as a brand position. Pairs against maximalist identity work.
Held by Nippon Design Center and Lars Muller
The books that taught the method
32Swiss practice written down by the people who ran it, and still in print.
Of Two Squares
A book that tells a story with geometry alone. Useful against the assumption that narrative requires pictures.
Held by MoMA
Isotype
Statistics as repeatable pictograms, built so an unschooled reader could check the claim. The origin of the whole pictogram tradition.
Held by University of Reading Otto and Marie Neurath Collection; published by Hyphen Press
Bauhaus weaving workshop
The only woman to run a Bauhaus workshop. Worth naming when the school is taught as a list of men.
Held by Bauhaus-Archiv
Die neue Typographie
The manifesto, then his own later retreat from it. Teach both halves.
Held by University of California Press (translation in print)
NKF cable catalogues
Technical information made genuinely clear, decades before anyone called it information design.
Held by Stedelijk Museum
New Directions book covers
Covers that interpret rather than illustrate. Good for the brief on abstraction.
Held by AIGA Design Archives
Thoughts on Design
Still the shortest good statement of why a designer should be able to explain a choice.
Held by Chronicle Books (in print)
Catalog Design Progress
Where information design becomes a discipline with rules. Parentheses around area codes are his.
Held by Cooper Hewitt
Meridian and New Directions covers
Took over the studio after Alvin Lustig died and became a stronger designer than the reputation allows. Good for talking about attribution and whose name survives.
Held by Cooper Hewitt
Designing Programmes
Design as a rule set that generates outcomes. The direct ancestor of design systems, and worth saying so in class.
Held by Lars Muller (in print)
First Things First Manifesto
Two versions, 1964 and 2000. Reading them together shows what the profession did and did not learn.
Held by Eye Magazine
Graphic Design Manual
Basel teaching written down: contrast, scale, and figure and ground as exercises.
Held by Niggli (in print)
On Weaving and the Bauhaus textile work
The Bauhaus sent women to the weaving workshop. She made it the most rigorous department in the building.
Held by Josef and Anni Albers Foundation; published by Princeton University Press
British Rail Corporate Identity Manual
A national rail network reduced to one symbol and one typeface, specified to the millimetre.
Held by Standards Manual
Design as Art
Short pieces that make method feel like play without making it trivial.
Held by Penguin and Phaidon
Typographie: A Manual of Design
The counterweight to Tschichold. Method over manifesto.
Held by Niggli (in print)
New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual
A whole system written down. Pairs with the brand book unit.
Held by Standards Manual
Design for the Real World
Opens by calling industrial design a harmful profession. Assign it early so the ethics unit is not an afterthought.
Held by Thames and Hudson
Visible Language Workshop and MIT Press work
Ran MIT Press design, then built the lab where typography met the screen. The direct ancestor of everything interface typography does now.
Held by MIT Museum and Cooper Hewitt
NASA Graphics Standards Manual
The worm, and the system around it. Shows an identity manual as a legal and operational document.
Held by Standards Manual
Grid Systems in Graphic Design
The book the studio unit is built on. Explains the grid as a way of deciding, not a way of decorating.
Held by Niggli (in print)
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Argues that chart junk is a moral failure, not a taste failure. Students argue back, which is the point.
Held by Graphics Press
Apple Human Interface Guidelines
The first widely read argument that consistency across applications is a design responsibility, not a limitation.
Held by Apple
The Design of Everyday Things
Affordance and feedback, explained with doors. The book that made usability legible to non-designers.
Held by Basic Books
Pastabilities and Italian modernism revival covers
Historical lettering used precisely rather than nostalgically.
Held by Louise Fili Ltd and AIGA
The Elements of Typographic Style
The reference students actually keep. Opinionated in a way a manual usually is not.
Held by Hartley and Marks
The End of Print
The book that took Ray Gun off the newsstand and onto every design student's shelf.
Held by Chronicle Books
Book design as an object
Books where the physical object carries the argument. Pairs with the printing history the library owns outright.
Held by Irma Boom Office and Lars Muller
Thinking with Type
The best first typography book, and it takes the reader seriously.
Held by Princeton Architectural Press
Designing Interactions
Interviews with the people who built the field. Names interaction design as a discipline with a history.
Held by MIT Press
Now You See It
A working designer explaining decisions in plain language. Good writing model for the studio reports.
Held by Princeton Architectural Press
Type with a position
10Faces drawn to say something about what reading is for.
Universal typeface and Bauhaus printed work
A single alphabet with no capitals, drawn from the circle and the line.
Held by Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin
Palatino, Optima and Zapfino
Calligraphic judgment carried into metal, then photo, then digital.
Held by Klingspor Museum and Letterform Archive
Univers and Frutiger
A family planned as a grid of weights and widths before any of it was drawn.
Held by Die Neue Sammlung
New Alphabet
A face shaped by what a CRT could actually render. Deliberately close to unreadable, and Crouwel published it anyway.
Held by Stedelijk Museum
Bell Centennial, Verdana and Georgia
Faces drawn for hostile conditions: thin phone paper, then bad screens. Constraint stated as the brief.
Held by MoMA
Original Macintosh icons and fonts
Pixel by pixel, the first interface most people ever trusted. Constraint as the whole design brief.
Held by MoMA
Emigre type: Oakland, Emperor, Matrix, Mrs Eaves
Faces drawn for the screen resolution of the moment, then defended as legitimate rather than apologized for. Mrs Eaves later showed the same designer working entirely inside history.
Held by Emigre Inc.
FF Meta
Designed for a specific client problem, then general. The commissioning unit.
Held by FontFont and Monotype; sold via MyFonts
Mrs Eaves
A revival that is openly an interpretation. Good for the authenticity discussion.
Held by Emigre Inc.
Gotham
Drawn from New York lettering, then used everywhere. Shows a face acquiring meaning through use.
Held by Frere-Jones Type
Posters, titles and packages
21The work itself, where it can still be seen.
Lengiz advertising and photomontage
Photomontage as public speech. The persuasion unit.
Held by Pushkin Museum and MoMA
Swiss travel posters
Photomontage and scale contrast used commercially, years before the Swiss school formalized it.
Held by MoMA
Rural Electrification Administration posters
Modernist form aimed at an audience that had never seen it. Pairs with the WPA posters the library owns outright.
Held by MoMA
Polish poster school work
Painted, handmade posters made under a state monopoly. Shows constraint producing a school rather than a style.
Held by Museum of Modern Art and Polish poster collections
Push Pin Studios work
Illustration, historical pastiche, and warmth, in the same years Swiss neutrality was winning.
Held by Push Pin and AIGA Design Archives
Film title sequences
Titles that set up the film rather than label it. The clearest example of design carrying narrative.
Held by Academy Film Archive
Tonhalle concert posters
Music rendered as geometry. Shows a method holding up across a long series. The Zurich collection is searchable rather than addressable, so the link opens eMuseum and the series is found from there.
Held by Museum fur Gestaltung Zurich
Blue Note album covers
Type, one photograph, two colours, several hundred times. The best argument in the course for a system that stays interesting.
Held by Blue Note and MoMA
Tokyo 1964 Olympic posters
Photography and the flag reduced to geometry. The first Olympic identity that worked as a system.
Held by MoMA
OSPAAAL solidarity posters
Posters folded into a magazine and mailed worldwide. Distribution as part of the design problem.
Held by Library of Congress and MoMA
Boston and Boston self-promotion campaigns
Advertising that made the industry look at its own racism. Confrontational on purpose.
Held by AIGA Design Archives
Pink and the Womens Design Program
Design taught as a political question. Useful when students assume neutrality is available.
Held by Getty Research Institute
Stiff Records sleeves
A designer who worked anonymously and quoted modernism as a joke.
Held by Victoria and Albert Museum
Factory Records sleeves
Sleeves that refused to name the band. Worth arguing about whether that is confidence or contempt.
Held by Design Museum
Nihon Buyo and theatre posters
A Noh face built from flat rectangles. Swiss method and Japanese tradition without either giving way.
Held by MoMA
4AD sleeves
Atmosphere as the brief. Nearly unreadable and completely coherent.
Held by Victoria and Albert Museum
Detroit focus gallery announcements
Deliberate error as a method. The strongest test of whether students can separate taste from judgement.
Held by Letterform Archive
Experimental Jetset work and writing
Modernism practised deliberately and self consciously after everyone declared it over.
Held by Roma Publications and Eye
AIGA Detroit lecture poster
Useful for the ethics discussion about what a designer owes the audience and themselves.
Held by Sagmeister and Walsh
Helvetica
A documentary students actually finish. Everyone from Vignelli to Sagmeister on one typeface, agreeing about nothing.
Held by Hustwit
Shapes in paint, stone and sound
18Paintings, prints, buildings, floors and music built on the mathematical objects in Shapes. Most are in copyright or are not files at all.
Cosmati pavement, Anagni Cathedral
Thirteenth-century marble floors where a triangle is filled with smaller triangles at least three levels deep. The resemblance to the Sierpinski triangle is a modern reading of the pattern; nothing records it as the masons’ intent.
Held by Cattedrale di Santa Maria, Anagni
Small stellated dodecahedron, marble floor inlay
An inlay in the basilica floor showing the small stellated dodecahedron, often dated about 1430, two centuries before Kepler described the solid. The attribution to Uccello is repeated widely and documented thinly.
Held by Basilica di San Marco, Venice
Portrait of Luca Pacioli
Pacioli demonstrates Euclid at a table while a glass rhombicuboctahedron, half full of water, hangs beside him. The attribution and the sitter beside him are both disputed.
Held by Museo di Capodimonte, Naples
Shukhov Tower, Polibino
The first hyperboloid tower, a water tower made entirely of straight steel members. Two families of straight beams lean against each other and make a curved lattice.
Held by Polibino, Lipetsk Oblast
Stringed Figure
Cherrywood and string. Moore named the string models in the Science Museum, London, as the source: straight threads strung between two frames to make a curved surface you can see through.
Held by Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution
Shakespearean Equation, King Lear
Painted from Man Ray’s 1934 photograph of a plaster model at the Institut Henri Poincaré, a Kummer surface with eight real double points. He named it for the drips that ran down the canvas like tears.
Held by Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution
Double Planetoid
Two tetrahedra pierce each other as a stella octangula. One is built over with houses and roads, the other is wild, and Escher wrote that they fit together without knowing about each other.
Held by National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gravitation
A small stellated dodecahedron with a creature caught in each of its twelve star points, neck and legs pushed out through the openings.
Held by M.C. Escher Foundation, shown at Escher in Het Paleis, The Hague
Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus)
Christ hangs before a cross made of eight cubes: the net of a tesseract, the four-dimensional cube unfolded into our space the way a cube unfolds into six squares.
Held by The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Metastaseis
For 61 players, first heard at Donaueschingen in 1955. Each string glissando is a straight line on Xenakis’s pitch and time graph, and together the lines sweep curved surfaces, which he later built in concrete.
Held by Boosey & Hawkes
The Sacrament of the Last Supper
The supper takes place inside a vast transparent dodecahedron. Dalí tied its twelve pentagonal faces to the twelve apostles, and the gallery reads the enclosure as the room of the scene.
Held by National Gallery of Art, Washington
Philips Pavilion, Expo 58, Brussels
A tent of hyperbolic paraboloid shells. Xenakis said he had built the ideas of Metastaseis in it: the straight lines of the glissandi became the straight lines of the shells.
Held by Demolished in 1959
Möbius Strip II (Red Ants)
Ants walk the band in single file. Each one passes over both faces of the strip and comes back to its start, because the strip has only one face.
Held by National Gallery of Art, Washington
United States Pavilion, Expo 67 (the Biosphère)
A geodesic sphere of steel tubes 76 metres across, the best known of Fuller’s domes.
Held by Parc Jean-Drapeau, Montreal
Jurassic Park
Each section of the novel opens with a further iteration of the dragon curve, under Ian Malcolm’s lines about how a system turns unpredictable.
Held by Alfred A. Knopf
Boy’s surface
A steel model of Boy’s surface, installed outside the institute on 28 January 1991. Its strips follow a polar grid under the parametrization of Robert Bryant and Rob Kusner.
Held by Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach
Klein bottle, single surface model
One of a series of glass Klein bottles blown for the Science Museum. Some in the series are cut open to show the two Möbius bands a Klein bottle is made of.
Held by Science Museum Group, London
Mandelbrot Set
A pop song about the set, from the album Where Tradition Meets Tomorrow. It names the Sierpinski gasket on the way.
Held by Jonathan Coulton